I've sketched out a design and begun implementation of a programming language, called Hito. Partly, this is just a programming exercise for me, but I also think the language might fill a niche that is currently unfilled.

Hito (from the Japanese pronunciation of the vaguely lambda-esque character 人, which also means "person"), is designed as a embeddable, lightweight scripting language that is purely functional. In particular, it's designed as an embeddable scripting language for situations where something like Lua even would be overkill. Often, full imperative procedures feel to me too heavy, but a language for quick specification of some calculations, formulas, pipelines or filters would be ideal. An example would be mark calculation formulae for a course gradebook. That said, the language is fairly extensible, so it could in theory be used for much more complicated applications.

I've nearly finished the first prototype implementation, which is written entirely in fairly clean, modern C. Primitive operations are pluggable, just as function pointers supplied to the runtime. It uses a simple mark-and-sweep precise garbage collector and a three-stack abstract machine design for executing the code. It will be dynamically typed, with support for pattern matching and a lightweight kind of algebraic data types, and higher-order functions and closures. The syntax is fairly clean, I think, and designed to be approachable to non-FP people. I have yet to make a proper website, but there is a code repository if you want to poke around.

I have a fairly large collection of anthem books and musical scores for sacred music (see my Church Music Corner), to the point where it has become difficult to actually remember what scores I have and where they might be found. So, I made a small plug-in for forester to make sortable, searchable tables for TSV files, and made a small database of all my anthem books. You can have a look at it here.

I'm increasingly uncomfortable keeping my code, this forest, and many of my papers on GitHub, seeing as they feed data to the dreaded bots, they are owned by Microsoft (who feed data and money to the dreaded bots), and it no longer is as intuitive or useful as it used to be.

So, I'm interested in figuring out an alternative to host all my git repositories. Forester uses sourcehut, which is nice because it's so lightweight and free of the dreaded bots, but I find the interface for it very confusing. Perhaps I just need to get used to it. Does anyone have any other suggestions?

DIGNUS est Agnus qui occísus est, accípere virtútem, et divinitátem, et sapiéntiam, et fortitúdinem, et honórem. Ipsi glória et impérium in sæcula sæculórum.

This Sunday we were very few in numbers and without a director at All Saints Ainslie but we held it together for Isom's King of all ages:

King of all Ages, throned on high,

Yet saviour too of those with faith,

Death at your onslaught died in fear,

And grace triumphant rules supreme.

Risen from death, the heav'nly Christ,

Receives from God the Father's hand,

Power over all created things,

A gift he could not know on Earth.

Then at your coming on the clouds,

With shining strength to be our judge,

Cancel the debt we owe you still,

Give back the glory we have lost.

Glory to you, O Christ our Lord,

Exalted far beyond our sight,

Reigning and forevermore,

with Father and with Paraclete.

I busted out my falsetto for a few bits, but we survived. The Carols and Lessons service is coming up on December 7th, so we have many rehearsals over the next few weeks.